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Saturday, January 5, 2013

Good News, Google Doesn’t Harm Us – Not Much Anyway

We can all breathe a sigh of relief. Google does not harm us in any way
as consumers. Doesn’t violate anti-trust and competition laws by highlighting
search results for its own services and products. Doesn’t reduce our search
options, no; doesn’t use and abuse us definitely not. Good, that’s settled
then.

It does change its search algorithms 500 times a year. It does have
endless resources to fight legal anti-trust battles. It does have the will to
ignore how it destroys livelihoods of loyal customers. It does manage to serve
its own interests and aggrandize itself constantly. But none of that hurts
us.

For over a year and half Google-God has been fighting an antitrust battle
with the Federal Trade Commission, who read through 9 million documents trying
to get to the truth. While we were all presuming that truth to be one thing,
now it looks as if for them it was something different. Pause a moment and
think about how much it costs to read through 9 million documents, by the
way.

But that wasn’t hurtful to US taxpayers, no. By the bye. It wasn’t the
only thing regulators did in their search for the Truth. They let their
ears be bent by angry competitors and patiently listened to sworn testimony
from Google-God executives bleating innocence. What about testimony from the small people? I don't have an answer for that.

At the end of it all, regulators closed the
investigation without bringing a complaint. Not a single one. In fact they
concluded that consumers had been largely unharmed. Interesting use of language
there. How harmed does the public have to be before it’s considered
damaged?

Google has
to make some changes, but apparently they’re not important enough to have
warranted an official complaint. They have to stop making it difficult for
competitors to license some patents and manage their advertising campaigns on
Google. Websites will also be able to refuse to let Google use their content to
bolster their own services. How much and how Google will penalize them
is unclear – but that they will is a sure bet.

That
Google needed to be reprimanded (because that’s all it was, the FTC has no way
of enforcing the changes because the complaint regarding them isn’t official)
doesn’t of itself pont to a violation? I wonder what the FTC’s guidelines were.

Here’s the
thing about Google. It dominates the world. And nobody gets to world domination
without abuse, which leaves footprints if anybody wants to see them. How did I
get to know about Google? I didn’t go searching. They made themselves more
visible than anybody else. Forget about Uncle
Sam Wants You, Google Wants You now.

I’m sure
there’s nobody in the world who doesn’t admire how clever the people behind
Google are. Clever, mind-bogglingly creative, and with immense drive. That’s
admirable. Some of what they're doing with it is fantastic. Some of it isn't.
There was a time when their ethos was about adding value to the world, so their
parameters made sense, they were for our own good. They
sucked us all in with it, much like Facebook did.

Now the ethos has
the same exterior message but the underlying reality and drive behind their
policies is sinister. It’s about adding profit to Google, no matter who they
take down, how much they invade your privacy and strip you of choice then make
it hard for you to reclaim it. If you don’t do what they want – and it’s never
about the general good any more, it’s about theirs – they penalize you or
effectively shut you down.

That the FTC took so much trouble to inspect all the presented evidence
speaks well for them. That they found plenty but trivialized it and said they
found nothing is troubling. And what about me? I use Google a lot. This blog is a Google product and it works well. I'm grateful for that. But I'm going to be more selective about how much power I give Google over me. A drop in the ocean? Of course. It won't matter to them but it matters to me. I don't like bullies.

Creativity given full reign is beautiful thing. When it becomes a tool
for exploitation it’s deadly.